


And You're Not Here To Get Me Through It All

by UniverseOnHerShoulders



Series: Prompt Fills [45]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Confession Dial (Doctor Who), Episode: s09e11 Heaven Sent, F/M, Loss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-21
Updated: 2019-09-21
Packaged: 2020-10-13 11:43:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20581952
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/UniverseOnHerShoulders/pseuds/UniverseOnHerShoulders
Summary: In his confession dial, the Doctor ruminates on the reason for his presence there: Clara Oswald.





	And You're Not Here To Get Me Through It All

**Author's Note:**

> From the prompt:
> 
> _‘But I can remember, Clara. You don’t understand, I can remember it all. Every time. And you’ll still be gone. Whatever I do, you still won’t be there.’ Those lines always really hit home with me. I’ll take whatever you’d like to do with them._

The thought of an eternity spent in his own Confession Dial was damning, but then, the Doctor supposed, that was somewhat the point. This was supposed to be a place of quiet solitude; a place where he could spend time putting his affairs in order prior to leaving the universe on a permanent basis. This was supposed to be a final time of peace and tranquillity, and yet his people – warlike and vituperative as they were – had found a way to corrupt even this most time-honoured of traditions, and he reasoned that it was nothing less than what he deserved. Even under the broadest definition of the term, he was a war criminal; he’d committed genocide and felt little by way of remorse for it. He’d betrayed everything that his people held dear, and refused to succumb to the parts of him that craved power and status and respect. 

Or had he? Had that not been the point of his fascination with Earth? Had the intrinsic appeal of the human race not been, at least in kind, their absolute wonderment at all that he could show them; their awe and wonder as they saw all that he could do; their absolute decrees which made him, in effect, the highest authority on their tiny, vulnerable planet? He remembered a plane and a convergence of world leaders; remembered the title they had bestowed upon him; and most of all, remembered the way that it had made him feel; a heady rush of nauseated embarrassment and terror that was almost, but not quite, equalled by an exhilarating, swooping sense of excitement at the prospect of wielding such power.

Power. It was an aphrodisiac and an adrenaline rush all of its own; it was hard-wired into his DNA to give him the kind of high that humans died in search of. And yet as he craved it, so he loathed it; he accepted it only with the utmost reluctance, entirely aware of how it could corrupt, bowing and bending even the strongest people he knew until they were nothing but lifeless husks of their former selves, becoming the very things they had once purported to despise. The Time Lords were one such example; they had never been given power but had instead conferred it upon themselves and seized it by force, until eventually they had come to see themselves as gods. And where had that got them? It had got them here, corrupting their own traditions and beliefs in favouring of punishing him; he, who as much a war criminal as any of them, and yet he was not being apprehended for that. This particularly exquisite torture was not for the crime of being a Time Lord.

This particular torture was his fate for going native. He had become too human; he had developed too many attachments to a planet and a people that were not his. 

_People_. 

He scoffed inwardly. It wasn’t ‘people.’ The human race was, at his own pessimistic admission, a lost cause – he had been up and down their timelines enough to know that they might improve and self-ameliorate for short periods, but they were, ultimately, condemned by their own inherent selfishness and stupidity. He loved them, yes, but there was only one reason that he was here.

Clara Oswald.

She was, in the broadest of terms, ‘people,’ he supposed, although he had as much in common with the other human beings with whom she shared her planet as he did. She was brave; had she not shown that to him, even at the end? As she had walked to her own death with her head held high, she had been brave. She hadn’t sought to escape or run from what was to come; she hadn’t tried to plead or beg or barter. She had accepted her fate. She had met death gladly, as an old friend, and he supposed that for her, that was precisely whom death was. She had seen her mother die; and she had not been there, but the lingering, insidious suffering caused by Danny’s death had affected her beyond what she cared to admit. She had seen planets burn; she had seen people she had yearned to save perish. She had sacrificed herself for him willingly, and condemned thousands of versions of her own self to a thousand deaths in his name. 

This would not be his final death, but it would be in her name that he suffered. There was little point to a world without her; little sense in a universe that was lacking in her. There were thousands of echoes of her, but each was like a poorly made photocopy; there was this or that detail different, and each was lacking the unique and finely-drawn detail of the original. 

There was the way she smiled, and the way that she threw her head back when she laughed, exposing the column of her throat and tossing her hair back over her shoulders, so that it tumbled away from her face in loose waves. He’d preferred it long, once, enjoyed the way it fell as she moved; but now he had been forced to admit that in its diminished form it was equally pretty. Short and choppy, it had framed her expressions in a way that drew the eye, and even in death, it had fallen around her face like a dark halo, reminding him of all he had lost. And yet as he’d lifted her body from the cobbles of Trap Street, it had not been her hair or her smell or the feel of her in his arms that he had focused on; all he could think was that he would never see her eyes again. Warm, dark, chestnut-hued eyes; there were emotions contained within that he had only seen shades of before. It was as though, pre-Clara, he had only seen human emotion in black and white, as though in crudely drawn caricature. With Clara, he saw how humans felt in the full spectrum of technicolour, from the warm yellow of happiness to the icy blue of grief. 

He’d vowed, after they’d lost Danny, to memorise her face, all the better to understand the newly-colourised range of human emotion that was expressed there. He still had the book, tucked away in his pocket, that bore each of her expressions, picked out in lovingly-detailed watercolours and captioned with the appropriate explanation for how she was feeling; what she was saying; how she had reacted. He recalled the way she had looked at him when he’d admitted to devoting hours to learning her and the way she looked, back in the Viking village; recalled the way he couldn’t read _that_particular expression, and it remained in his journal even now, maddeningly and eternally uncaptioned. It hadn’t made sense to him, because he’d had no context; there had been no words to accompany it; no actions that he could read. Had she been touched? Amused? Annoyed? He still didn’t know, and he yearned to ask her. 

Clara’s eyes haunted him, as he made his way around the castle. He found the memory of them acutely agonising in a way that nothing else was, because he could see them even when he closed his eyelids; it was as though they were burned into his retina, cycling through a thousand expressions in a single blink. He could hear her voice – he _spoke _to her voice, as though doing so might make it real; might encourage the disembodied tones to find a physical body and come and find him – and yet it was the eyes that brought him the most pain. It was the eyes that he could see, wide and afraid as they faced down death, although this was mere supposition. Clara had died with her back to him, and for that he was both grateful and regretful. If only he could have been the last thing she saw, instead of that sight being her own death approaching her on silent wings. If only he could have brought her comfort in her final seconds of life, instead of her being consumed by her own inevitable terror as the raven bore down on her. And yet she had never wavered. Never screamed. There had been a tear that he had magnanimously ignored, but that was all that had escaped her.

She had always been, to his knowledge, the bravest of the brave. She had taken foolish risks that had proved fortuitous and beneficial; she had made gambles and given things up that any sane person would have shuddered at. She had walked and run and strolled into danger at his side, always in her ludicrously high heels, and she sometimes – often, in their later days – consented to holding his hand as she did so. The memory of that made his heart ache; how warm and soft and alive her palm had felt in contact with his own. It was etched into his mind’s eye; the tactile sensation of it, the way she’d squeezed his hand to encourage him to squeeze back, and the subsequent, silly back-and-forth battles of varying grip strength that ensued. The loss of her physical presence cut him like a knife, but the memory of her bravery and her wit and her compassion alongside that robbed him of his breath and brought him to the verge of tears. And yet he only allowed himself the luxury of tears as he plunged from the tower at the summit of the castle; watching with detachment as they dripped from his skin and landed in the water below.

This was all for her. There was little sense or meaning in a world that was devoid of her; little joy that could be derived from a world that did not contain Clara Oswald in all her living, breathing glory. He couldn’t see the point in it; couldn’t comprehend a universe in which they were not together, prophecies be damned. The words surrounding the Hybrid couldn’t refer to them; they wouldn’t refer to them, he was sure, not when it came down to it and he truly examined the words with the full weight of his concentration. This was some kind of misunderstanding, and until it could be straightened out, then he would bear his punishment magnanimously, and try not to allow himself extensive losses of control, lest his focus be shifted from where it was needed most. 

And yet… he seemed to have been toiling for so long now. He had once been able to recall each of his own deaths at the hands of the Veil, and yet now they bled into each other; now they had become one long, throbbing wave of agony, each overlapping with the next, until it was a long, drawn-out sensation of pain, the memory of which made him double over. He had been suffering for so long, and yet still the wall of azbantium remained; still she was not there; and still the memory of her haunted him. 

He wanted to break down. He wanted to give in. 

And yet still he plodded on.

A universe without Clara Oswald was anathema to him. He would not and could not endure it.


End file.
